Alfred ceramic artist, alumnus John Gill to exhibit at Yossi Milo Gallery, NYC

 “WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE?” will be on view from Thursday, March 13, through April 12. An artist’s reception will be held at the gallery from 6 to 8 pm March 13.

Retired from a long career as a ceramic art professor at Alfred University’s School of Art & Design, New York State College of Ceramics, Gill has been celebrated in the field of ceramic art for over half a century and has long staked his work on the vessel as a starting point, creating endless variations on vases, ewers, bottles, and platters. He embraces postmodern levity over discernible functionality, and the resulting works take utility only in name.

“I hate to just execute a piece,” Gill says, “instead I ask the clay, what do you want to be?”

In this pursuit, Gill focuses on building ceramic volume by joining together and manipulating innumerable clay slabs, and each work manifests in a joyful collision of color, texture, and raucous form. Gill constructs these using a time-tested hand-building method, joining and molding flat shapes to make the angular and undulating body of each work.

This presentation includes a grouping of monumental vases and covered jars, created over the past three years. These vessels are intricate inside and out, and architectural grandeur on a miniature scale is hidden away within their jubilant exteriors.

Especially in his larger open forms, Gill approaches his work from every possible angle, rotating it as though in zero gravity and building it without a defined top or bottom. In the case of his jars, once they finally come down to Earth, the artist completes them with precise-fitting, highly ornate lids. Gill’s closed forms create new private spaces and invoke a distinct utility within his lexicon of subverted purposes: to conceal. The inside of the jar becomes a secret, its unseen volume now enclosed.